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In this HowTo I will describe how to prepare an Ubuntu 8.04 LTS server for OpenVZ. With OpenVZ you can create multiple Virtual Private Servers (VPS) on the same hardware, similar to Xen and the Linux Vserver project. OpenVZ is the open-source branch of Virtuozzo, a commercial virtualization solution used by many providers that offer virtual servers. The OpenVZ kernel patch is licensed under the GPL license, and the user-level tools are under the QPL license.

It used to be that if you wanted Linux, it was least expensive to buy Windows pre-installed and replace it with Linux. Now, at least on some notebooks, if you want Windows, it is cheaper to buy Linux and install a retail copy of Vista.

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol used to distribute large amounts of data. The initial distributor of the complete file or collection acts as the first seed. Each peer that downloads the data also uploads it to other peers. Relative to standard internet hosting, this provides a significant reduction in the original distributor's hardware and bandwidth resource costs. It also provides redundancy against system problems and reduces dependence on the original distributor. Here's a list of bittorrent clients available in Linux.

FrostWire is a P2P (Peer to Peer) client written in Java. To install and run FrostWire, you will first need to download the DEB package from here (just select the Ubuntu/Debian package).

A good way to see how your Web applications and server will behave under high load is by testing them with a simulated load. We tested several free software tools that do such testing to see which work best for what kinds of sites. If you leave out the load-testing packages that are no longer maintained, non-free, or fail the installation process in some obscure way, you are left with five candidates: curl-loader, httperf, Siege, Tsung, and Apache JMeter. Daniel Rubio already covered JMeter in detail, so I will not go into it again here, but I will compare it to the others in the final evaluation at the end of the article.

A port scanner (such as nmap) is a piece of software designed to search a network host for open ports. Cracker can use nmap to scan your network before starting attack. You can always see scan patterns by visiting /var/log/messages. But, I recommend the automated tool called psad - the port scan attack detector under Linux which is a collection of lightweight system daemons that run on Linux machines and analyze iptables log messages to detect port scans and other suspicious traffic.

The Task Spooler project allows you to queue up tasks from the shell for batch execution. Task Spooler is simple to use and requires no configuration. You can view and edit queued commands, and you can view the output of queued commands at any time.

On Monday at Akademy, KDE's yearly world summit, the KDE e.V. held its general assembly, covering a wide range hot topics, regarding licensing and community scalability. While part of the meeting is dictated by intricacies of German association law, the AGM also provides a way of effectively solving issues arising in the KDE community and deciding on ways to move forward as an organisation. This year's KDE e.V. General Assembly endorsed a Code of Conduct, the Community Working Group and a Fiduciary License Agreement for KDE contributors.

Sun Microsystems, the original advocate of OpenOffice, missed the boat when IBM, Canonical, Red Hat and Novell announced the Microsoft-Free PC initiative. So, has Sun squandered its early lead as an alternative to Microsoft Office? Works With U looks for answers.

Over the years, I've probably created thousands of reports for customers and co-workers. Usually, I have a web-based program that generates reports in either html or comma-separated format. The html format is a lot prettier and usually gives the user what they want. The comma-separated format allows the user to easily import the results into Excel, or into Open Office in the case of my more enlightened users. From there, they add formatting to the raw data and send the resulting report to whereever it's going. All this formating is done manually by customers who tend to want the same report periodically, so this results in a lot of re-work on their part. Most of the time, they're just happy to get the data and don't complain about having to pretty it up a bit. But there is a better way.

During a conversation at LinuxWorld Expo, Canonical VP Malcolm Yates described how mainframes running Ubuntu Linux could drive major software as a service (SaaS) projects forward. Here's the scoop from MSPmentor.

Professionals who work on the basis of billable hours rarely take the time out to write an article for publication unless they have a valid reason for doing so. That's why I'm generally a bit sceptical when lawyers come out with articles that attempt to make a case against the use of free and open source sofware. No lawyer would ever be paid the same rates for a third-rate article about FOSS as he/she is paid for listening to a client - hence my scepticism. But, surprisingly, over the past three months two members of the legal profession have taken the time to pen what they, no doubt, consider to be serious objections to the use of FOSS.

When it comes to virtualising Linux, VMWare has always had the edge of Microsoft’s Virtual PC which has limited video display support. Although these were the best two, there have been other lesser-known options like XENSource. Here’s Sun’s VirtualBox and why it is truly kick-ass. You know what virtualisation is; it lets you run – on one physical computer – multiple, separate, computer environments. Each environment behaves as if it is genuinely running on real hardware directly. Virtualisation lets you run an operating system with all its bits and pieces on top of your existing operating system.

The second Akademy day started a bit later in the morning than the previous one, yet somehow most visitors managed to look much more tired. Maybe the social event (read Nokia sponsored beer) from yesterday has something to do with that. Even tired, people visit the talks and write code, so you can expect more code, discussions and blogs today.

OpenOffice is much more than a simple alternative to Microsoft Office... Here, we’ll show you some simple tips and tricks so that you can use OpenOffice in the easiest and most efficient way possible

Sometimes, you can recover that big oops!

During LinuxWorld Expo, Alfresco leveraged a growing relationship with Canonical to continue its open source war against Microsoft SharePoint. Here's the scoop from The VAR Guy.

Dell is shipping two new laptops with widescreen LCD displays and Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04) operating systems with DVD playback. Additionally, the largest U.S. PC maker has started offering Hardy Heron on three models previously available with the earlier Gutsy Gibbon Ubuntu release.

If you run scripts that require a lot of execution time it's a good idea to try to avoid letting them overload your system. You can run them via nice, but if for example your script is sending a bunch of emails your email daemon isn't running via nice and it may itself get out of control. One way to deal with this is by using the values in /proc/loadavg to pause when your system load gets too high.

When Sam Lamonica stepped into the CIO role at Rudolph and Sletten five years ago, he set out to tame an ungainly network by using an orderly open source network monitoring solution. "Basically there was nothing in place," says Lamonica, whose Redwood City, Calif.-based company is a general contractor in the construction industry. "The infrastructure was pretty much a hodge-podge of different, disparate pieces and systems that had been cobbled together by a couple of previous IS directors. So basically it was a swamp.